Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei received and addressed staff and higher officials of National Population and Housing Census 2016 on Tuesday. Ayatollah Khamenei lamented the dearth of ‘accurate and precise’ figures in diverse statistics provided to the public by government organizations as ‘great plight’ of the economy; “sometimes, inaccurate figures in inflation and unemployment erodes the public trust to government mechanisms of preparing such figures; scientifically correct, accurate and precise figures are pivots of any grand-scale decision-making, to which I believe the public should contribute through helping the census collectors in the process,” he told the meeting.

“Census should reveal trends and relevant changes in certain indices over time; this chronicling of events would be of great help for officials in times of emergency decisions; inaccurate and forged statistics is a bane of administration; the country lags behind in terms of census and other statistics and officials do not have precise information of the real figures,” Ayatollah Khamenei objected.

He focused on examples where accurate census and figures would reveal progress; “in economics for example, figures should communicate the extent to which young cohort are engaged and motivated to contribute to the economic activity; this would be invaluable in Resistance Economy where real figures of growth of domestic production provide the firms with their feed to work upon in assessment of economic conditions of the day,” said the leader.

Ayatollah Khamenei criticized the dominant view where sitting governments had usually openly questioned the accuracy and validity of different figures and statistics of the past governments; “aging population was once a real problem in the past decades which was treated by policies to control population; however, with aging population, economy was in trouble finding effective labor force. I believe the declining trend was timely detected and curbed by the officials which was laudable; the source of difference should be addressed seriously; manipulation of statistics and figures for specific objectives are subject to public judgement and is a serious inaccuracy,” he concluded.